Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
Food Thread: You Say Dumplings, I say Kneidlach: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off!
—CBD
I couldn't resist the photo! There is a joke somewhere about it being the major food groups of the Irish, but I would never stoop so low!
That is a full brisket from Wild Fork Foods, which is a frozen-food purveyor with a robust shipping business and also a bunch of stores across the country. I have been pleased with some of their stuff, although it is obvious how they manage costs...their butchers are not the most impressive trimmers in the industry. But that brisket is sold as trimmed, and they do a good enough job at an excellent price, so all I have to do is trim a bit more fat, and it's off to the races, or into the roasting pan for a quick sear.
Well, actually it takes a fair amount of time, because it's a big piece of meat!
What? No! I am not smoking it, because braised (or roasted) brisket is one of the foods of MY people! Passover starts in a few days, and I have a bunch of people for the Seder. While I would have preferred another main course, I was informed that brisket was on the menu this year. No, I have no free will when it comes to these things...why do you ask?
Come to think of it, smoked brisket would be good! There are Jews in Texas...well, do you make traditional or Texan-style for Passover? It's tradition, not religious law, so I could make collard greens and smoked brisket and a big pot of beans, and nobody could complain.... much.
The only thing that is non-negotiable is Matzoh-Ball Soup. For two reasons. First, that's what my mother made, and second, mine is spectacular! And yes, I use duck fat instead of vegetable oil. Of course my mother once made Matzoh-Ball Soup with bacon bits inside, so you can probably guess that I didn't grow up in a Kosher home!
By the way, if you really want to show off, call them "kneidlach," because that's the Yiddish word!
I try not to fall into the foodie conceit that the hipper, rarer, and more expensive the ingredients are, the better the end result. Plain old black pepper is good! But damnit! MY MiL gave me some Cambodian black pepper a few years ago and I was infuriated to discover that it was fantastic! Now, it could be because it was fresh (she bought it there), but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is simply better quality than the stuff I buy. And this is a new batch she just gave me, so I will be busily grinding and tasting to see what's what!
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For whatever reason I decided a week or so ago that pizza is low-carb. So I made some dough from a standard NY style pizza recipe. And while the pizza itself was tasty, I think the dough recipe was designed for ease of handling rather than for taste. But that is a problem with lots of bread recipes...handling high-hydration dough can be a challenge!
I'll dig up a better recipe in a month or so and see what happens.
That's disgusting on so many levels, that I am suspicious. It's either AI, or somebody is trying to drive eyeballs to their site. It's horrible, but maybe it's like a crash on the highway....
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I hate this sort of crap. It is conspicuous consumption of the worst kind, akin to the Potlatch ceremonies of the Northwest Indians. NYC steakhouse rolls out an ultra-decadent hot cocoa cocktail loaded with booze -- for a whopping $1K If you need to validate your social status by pissing away $1,000 on something this stupid, just give me the cash and I will stand next to you for 30 minutes or so and tell you how impressive you are.
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The Dijon mustard that I ate in France is simply better than the same brand that is exported to America. I find that maddening, but my one attempt at making mustard failed miserably, so I either have to find a local source for French domestic Dijon, or fly there regularly to keep my larder stocked.
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Well, the garlic is out in the sunshine, probably soon to be eaten by those vile rodents with bushy tails and a penchant for damaging my home. But if they survive the squirrel apocalypse, and actually grow into something edible, I will be in garlic heaven! In case it doesn't, send all of your excellent home-grown garlic to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
Rumor has it that the Bourbon Bubble is bursting. I have seen no evidence of decreasing prices, but maybe the bursting started somewhere else! I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.
The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!
Yes, it's an old house...coming up on 100 years old in a few years. And of course we'll have a party, with cake and some gasoline and matches!
That is the last of the original moulding (molding?), and as you can see it was pieced together with what I can only assume was scraps from the rest of the house. The math suggests that the house was built in the beginning of the depression, so it is entirely possible that the builder tried mightily to save every penny.
But that line between pieces irritates me every time I see it, so that is the next thing to be replaced.
In my youth I did that sort of work, and I was taught early on how to avoid exactly that sort of problem. And if the trim carpenter who installed that moulding wasn't as good as I was, he was very bad indeed!
No Kings? If We Had A King, These Morons Would Be In Jail
—CBD
The "No Kings" demonstration on an overpass across Route 4 in Bergen County New Jersey was an anemic, lightly attended hissy fit by a few dozen true believers, even though it is a fairly liberal area.
But what do they believe? Everything they are told by the Democrat party apparatus, without questioning the underlying data or even whether it makes any sense at all. The Democrats have cultivated cadres of shock troops they can mobilize to wear their old Tie-Dye shirts and chant awful rhymes about the cause de jour, and that has been the case for a very long time. "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!" Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ Has Got To Go!" "Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" Those are 60 years old, and even stupider today then they were in the 1960s.
Today's chants are no more intelligent, and no more representative of an honest protest movement based on political differences. "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!" Really? A cursory examination of real fascist dictatorships would yield the uncomfortable fact that street protests were and are sometimes met with machine gun fire, mass arrests, and one-way flights on helicopters. Or, "Say It Loud, Say It Clear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here!" That's particularly brain-dead, since it carefully conflates legal vs. illegal immigration, which the parrots on the street don't understand, but their masters on the left certainly do!
The left has always embraced chants and songs and long-winded diatribes that can be trotted out to answer any challenge. That most of these things are utter nonsense, employing circular logic, false historical narratives, and flat-out lies is secondary to their power to inflame the hearts of their true believers.
That is one reason why Charlie Kirk was so effective. He was able to answer their jingoistic canned phrases with facts, and since these people are intellectually bereft, they would often sputter and stutter and stalk off, because their logical basis for their beliefs is simply cant, and without a firm historical or data-driven foundation.
Yet it often works, especially when the left employs their dancing monkeys in the entertainment industry to provide the rhyming and the singing and the angry denunciations of today's crisis.
But the two-edged sword of social media and instant communication has broadened the reach of these script-reading sub-wits, while simultaneously exposing their stupidity to the world. Sure, Springsteen will draw people to the protest, but he looks and sounds like an aging lesbian, especially when he is surrounded on stage by his peers, who also look like aging lesbians! Did Billie Eilish further the cause of... um... indigenous people, or just expose herself as an ignorant and entitled fool? When George Clooney flies to a climate conference on a private jet, he might make a splash on the talk shows, but a lot of people see his rank hypocrisy.
Below the fold is a wonderful example of the intellectual vacuousness of 2026's entertainment spokesmen. It's painful and laughable...you choose which!
The Secrets of Publishing, part 2 : Bookstores and Libraries and Distributors, oh my!
Greetings, O Book Thread! They let me come back. (Actually, the lock on the door of the server room is a little flimsy...)
So how are bookstores picking their books anyways?
Back in the good old days, a bookstore owner or minions would have some vague idea, from recommendations or personal experience, what books were good and could sell. Then the big publishers consolidated, were run by accountants and NOT book lovers, and books became items in a catalog to be ordered like produce by people who voluntarily eat brussel sprouts. And the bookstores were the same. Books were treated as widgets and rather than personal knowledge bookstore owners went with the recommendations from the publishing houses and ordered only from the big distributors. Maybe some smaller publishing houses that are trendy and/or had kompromat on their purchasing department manager.
But what about small, innocent publishers and indie writers? Can they get their books in bookstores?
Yes, but it is non-trivial. First, you have to get your books in the distributor catalogs and it must have a print version, not just ebook. There are two main ones, Ingrams and Baker&Taylor. They charge a fee per book. Also, your book has to have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and it can NOT be the one Amazon gave it. [Sidebar: Publishers hate Amazon and so do bookstores. They firmly believe Amazon is stealing all their business. Well, that part is true ... .
Anyway, they refused to let Amazon books sully their premises. So, you have to have your own ISBN. And they cost money.] All of this is annoying but doable, except ... bookstores demand the right of RETURNS.
Bookstores hate risk. And for various stupid historical reasons, they want to return books that don’t sell, but sending books back is expensive, so they would cut off the cover and send THAT back, and “pulp” the rest of the book. Which is why you sometimes see “if you bought this book without a cover it has been stolen”. Now they don’t even want to do the cover. They just want to either dump the book entirely to get their refund. Oh, and they want a huge chunk of the cover price too. You can actually have a negative invoice if there are too many returns. I have books in the catalogs but not a lot of sales to bookstores. A book with no push from publishers (yes they can provide monetary incentives to bookstores to pick their books) means bookstores overlook it. They will of course have Oprah’s picks and a few other celebrity things but the rest is just based on pub listings and push.
Why bother with bookstores then?
Because a big vector for reader discovery is libraries and they also use the distributors. Even librarians with an interest in new books (and indie) don’t have the time or the resources to hunt them down individually. Their purchasing systems, and I actually worked at a company that made that software so I know a good bit about it, require the ISBN at a minimum and often also the distributor catalog or they can’t make a purchase. This is print and ebook, by the way.
And THEN you get the stupid library purchase rules for ebooks. An ebook is just a computer file, so why can’t they just have infinite copies? They don’t want to pay for infinite copies. Some publishing houses had insane rules like making libraires purchase a new license after 6 borrows (as if the file expired). Things have calmed down a bit and you can now allow “library licensing” where they pay a higher per-book price, once, and only allow one borrower at a time. It’s an “evolving situation” as they say at the War Department …. BUT! I am happy to say that without any effort on my part beyond getting in the catalog, my books are showing up in libraries! Including in Dubai. I have no idea who in Dubai asked for my book. I want to know.
Anyway, people who want more than the sample chapter on Amazon will go to the library to see if an author is worth the money, so I want my free ice cream samples out there. But it is annoying.
How can we get good books in bookstores again?
Good question! Going to bookstores and having them order books (in the catalog) that you know or suspect are good. They then know there is customer demand. Also know the tradpub industry is dying but like any ginourmous dinosaur, they die slowly. You won’t get an accurate feel for the book industry from a bookstore. Really and truly, indie by sales (units and dollars) is already doing better than tradpub. Even I, with my very first indie ebook, sold MORE units and got MORE money than the contract I was offered by tradpub. And all the intellectual property rights remain mine. (Bwahahah!)
Publicity remains the real problem. Tradpub doesn’t understand what the market wants either. You may have heard of Brandon Sanderson breaking Kickstarter with his secret book project in 2022. These are books his tradpublisher didn’t want at first, so he published them himself. That Kickstarter raised 41.7 million dollars in DAYS. The most funded project in Kickstarter’s history.
People really do want to read good books. They will pay good money for those books. Tradpub has proven they don’t know what people really want. The tricky thing is, still, connecting the writers to the readers … and nobody has figured that out yet. But we are working on it!
While TurboQuant is real and does substantially reduce the amount of memory taken up for quantized vector database used to store LLM weights while - and this is the trick - not noticeably increasing noise in the models, any connection with commodity DDR5 memory pricing is best expressed in the polar co-ordinate system that TurboQuant is built on.
This has been expected since DRAM prices headed the same way starting in November, but it was delayed by the large volume of devices already in the retail channel.
Now reality has hit, hard, with prices doubling and further increases likely. The video notes that spot prices have increased ninefold, though that doesn't mean that drive prices will increase by the same amount.
What it does mean is that the smaller manufacturers who didn't have existing long-term contracts have just been wiped out, while the companies making the NAND flash chips - Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, again, plus Western Digital, Kioxia, and China's YTMC, can set whatever prices they choose.
(The second horseshoe was the graphics card market, though that has been muted so far unless you were looking to buy an RTX 5070 Ti or higher. Prices of AMD and Intel cards have increased a little, but nothing like the devastation that has hit the memory market.)
That would be bad for OpenAI which is 100% bubble and good for Apple which is close to 0% bubble.
As for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, they'll survive either way, and Anthropic and xAI will likely do fine on a smaller scale than they had hoped.
ClickFix is an anagram which means "I'm too lazy to hack you myself but I think you're dumb enough do do the work for me". As the article shows, it presents a page telling users to open a terminal session and execute a command that will download and install the malware in question.
Where upon it steals all your passwords and the contents of any crypto wallets while laughing so hard it makes itself sick.
Saturday Night Club ONT - March 28, 2026 [D Squared]
—Open Blogger
Welcome to Club ONT - a collaboration of The Disco and The Dino. Come in in, grab a drink or 3. If you do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around, you'll find out what its all about.
She timidly asked, "Is it possible to speak to someone who can tell me how a patient is doing?"
The operator said, "I can. What's the name and room number?"
The old lady, in her weak voice, said, "Norma Findlay, Room 302."
The operator replied, "Let me place you on hold while I check with her nurse."
After a few minutes, the operator returned and said, "Oh, I have good news. Her nurse just told me that Norma is doing very well. Her blood pressure is fine, her blood work came back normal, and her physician, Dr. Cohen, has scheduled her to be discharged on Tuesday."
The old lady said, "Thank you. That's wonderful! I was so worried! God bless you!"
The operator replied, "You're more than welcome. Is Norma your daughter?"
The old lady said, "No, I'm Norma Findlay in Room 302. No one tells me shit."
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A nurse walks into a bank, totally exhausted after an 18-hour shift.
She grabs a deposit slip, pulls a rectal thermometer out of her purse, and tries to write with it. When she realizes her mistake, she looks at the flabbergasted teller and, without missing a beat, says,
"Well, that's just great... Some asshole's got my pen."
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Drink of the Night
To commemorate the start of baseball season, tonight we feature a Ballpark Paloma.
Ballpark Paloma cocktail recipe:
*1.5 oz Patrón Añejo
*.75 oz Fresh grapefruit juice
*.5 oz Simple syrup
*.25 oz Fresh lime juice
*1 Egg white
*Peychaud’s Bitters
*Tajin seasoning rim
METHOD
1. Combine the first five ingredients in an empty cocktail shaker.
2. Dry shake vigorously until combined.
3. Add ice to shaker and shake again to chill.
4. Double strain into a coupe glass rimmed with Tajín.
5. Top with drops of bitters to resemble baseball stitching.
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Club ONT Department of Youthful Exuberance
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed for one minute straight until I watched this. 😂 pic.twitter.com/xUZcGeD2WL
A recording of a dispatcher contacting Saginaw County Animal Care & Control confirmed a 911 call came in about 1 p.m. Wednesday from a St. Charles resident.
"Caller has a monkey wearing a diaper that's on their porch trying to get inside their house," the dispatcher says in the recording. "I guess it belongs to their new neighbors."
Officers arrived to find the female spider monkey, named Brazil, had already been returned to its home next door.
Authorities confirmed Brazil's owner was the same woman who brought a squirrel money into the Bay County Court Facility in 2017. The monkey was inside the woman's purse when she put it through the X-ray scanner.
Michigan does not have any laws prohibiting monkeys as pets. St. Charles does not have any local ordinances limiting primate ownership.
Congratulations Michigan. Sounds a lot like something that would be reported through the Pittsburgh scanner.
March 25 (UPI) -- Philadelphia International Airport celebrated National Cheesesteak Day by breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest line of cheesesteaks.
Airport eateries from PHL Food & Shops teamed up with the City of Philadelphia Department of Aviation to assemble 1,291 cheesesteaks on the concourse between Terminals B and C on Tuesday.
The sandwiches were made from a total 225 pounds of cheese sauce, 990 pounds of shaved beef and 1,291 foot-long rolls.
A Guinness World Records adjudicator was on hand to confirm the snaking line of sandwich was enough to create a new record.
Hmmm.... The Philadelphia airport delays were previously attributed to TSA funding and staffing, but apparently there is another explanation?!
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Too soon?
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The Club ONT Jukebox
We're featuring ladies of rock tonight!
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Prayers for the Horde from Reverend Hrothgar:
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Top 10ish Comments of the Week
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Club ONT is brought to you tonight by questionable infant placement
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Club ONT sincerely hopes you've had the time of your life. We know that you've never felt like this before. Stop looking at us with those hungry eyes!
Why are they overlong slogs of poorly thought out worldbuilding, self-seriousness, and and self-indulgent senses of coolness that just bore me to tears?
Why do these movies make so much money? Granted, removing Keanu Reeves from a starring role in the spin-off (he has an extended, mostly pointless cameo sprinkled throughout), Ballerina: From the World of John Wick seemed to hurt the last entry's ability to make money at the box office (it pretty obviously lost money considering its reported $90 million budget and $137 million haul at the worldwide box office), but my main focus is the four main entries themselves. I've seen Ballerina, and it does have some of the same problems as the first four, but it fixes one of my main complaints while creating others.
Could these movies have been written...better? Could they have covered the same ground but just been compelling in the interminable two hours of each film that wasn't dedicated to action?
Okay, I actually like the first entry. John Wick is a simple story of revenge that lasts for a grand 100 minutes (including credits) that is a thin reed on which to hang action sequences. The clear emotionality is just enough to support the action, make it all make sense, and make it compelling enough to watch in between the action beats. It's not great drama, but it's functional and clear. There are clear moments where it's obvious the creative team is inventing reasons for the movie to keep going, inventing reasons for Wick to not take revenge on the Russian gangster punk who killed his dog just so the movie can keep going. It's the ravages of making a supernaturally gifted assassin one's main character.
However, it does come other things as well. It implies relationships with Wick talking to figures from his past in cryptic terms about who he is, what he's capable of, and how he got out of the assassin game. It works well enough in the first entry because it's about building a mythos around this central figure on a killing spree, but the writers and director took the exact wrong lesson from it.
Because every movie after that takes that approach to character as gospel. John meets someone, like the main antagonist of the second film, Santino, who forces John to re-enter the game by invoking a marker that John had to swear to in order to leave. (I assume this works with the first movie where it was that movie's bad guy who gave him the task, but whatever.)
So, the film spends more than thirty minutes getting John from his house to the target he's supposed to kill (Santino's sister) so that Santino can take her seat at The Table, the governing body of the assassin underworld, or whatever. And when he meets Gianna, Santino's sister, they imply some kind of deep history, talk in serious tones for a long stretch, and action finally breaks out.
The space between the action is...interminable. And there's a lot of space between the action. The action itself is quite good. Not perfect. There are moments where it's obvious people are just waiting for the next hit, but with so much action, not every beat of every fight is gonna slap. Really, the quality of the action is very, very high. It's just, there's so much of it, and the stuff in between is so boring that the action beats are extended demo reels for the stunt team and little else. They don't really mean much because John Wick ceases to be much of a character, the character interactions he has are mostly implied relationships of characters who appear only briefly before he's off to another locale to fight more faceless goons.
However, watching all of the films in a row made it obvious that there was an attempt at a larger story. It's just it's told really badly. The overall story is Wick being forced back into the life, him making the choice to either become a tool of the High Table or be free, and then his quest to destroy the High Table, effectively, to overturn the system. It's just that the movies are more concerned with looking cool than actually telling the story.
I'm deeply, deeply frustrated by the bloated, 2.5-3 hour sequels to the focused, 100-minute long original. And I thought that the problems wouldn't be that hard to fix from a screenwriting point of view. So, I sat down and wondered...if the director of the movies, Chad Stahelski, came to me before the filming of Chapter 2,handed me the three scripts for the second, third, and fourth entries and asked for a rewrite. I couldn't scrap them completely because they were already building sets, had cast everyone, and had practiced every fight for months. I needed to keep the major elements, but I could change dialogue, rearrange scenes, expand and contract roles. That sort of thing.
So, what would I do?
Rewrites
I've had Dante's Inferno on the brain for a bit, and my first direction would be to take the ending of the first movie as a death. He's following his wife, Helen, into a metaphorical death. Each of the three following movies would be concerned with three circles of Hell each.
John Wick: Chapter 2, Limbo, Lust, and Gluttony
Wick makes his way home, and he's confronted by the fact that he's alone. He has no one anymore. He reflects on Helen, his passed wife, and then he starts to think of the people he had before he left the life. He focuses on Gianna, the last woman he loved before he met Helen. Lost and without purpose, he tries to contact her, but the five years away from the life has made it difficult. He wanders the haunts he had with her, but he's seen by Killa Harkan (a character from Chapter 4). Grotesquely overweight, he dangles the promise of meeting Gianna. John must kill someone for him, and he will let him know where Gianna is.
So, John takes the job, and he goes to Rome to kill the target, a woman. After fighting through a host of goons, it turns out that the target is Gianna herself. She asks him why he's doing this. He doesn't know. He doesn't ask. That's not the job. But, now that he has what was promised him, he feels the need to break the contract. However, she gets hit by a second assassin (Cassian, played by Common) sent by Harkan to make sure the job is done.
It becomes a chase to get to Harkan. John versus Cassian as John wants further vengeance, and we enter into Gluttony with Harkan being a king of excess, and when John ultimately gets Harkan, Harkan tells him that he was just following orders from Gianna's brother, Santino, because he can take her place at the High Table upon her death. That ends the first sequel.
John Wick: Chapter 3, Greed, Anger, and Heresy
We start in media res with John fights his way towards Santino in his mansion in Paris. Upon reaching something like a throne room, John is stopped by the presence of the Adjudicator. The Adjudicator confronts John, offering him whatever he wants in order to stop. He's killed too many of the High Table's agents, and they are willing to pay any price to get him to stop. However, the conversation cuts to the core of why John is doing what he's doing. She knows why he left in the first place. It wasn't love. It was because he knew that the work he did was evil, and he needed to get out. He's on a rampage because of his wife? His dog? Gianna, a woman he hadn't even thought of for five years? John can have Santino as long as John is done after that, but what does he actually want?
John sets out to find Santino, and he's in Arabia. John goes and meets with Sofia (Halle Berry) who helps him get into Santino's fortress where he fights through hordes of people to get to Santino, eventually killing him. The Adjudicator arrives, and offers him everything he wants, but he has to say what it is. What he actually wants is...blood. He only lives for violence. So, she offers him Santino's spot on the High Table.
On the High Table, John becomes ruthless, ordering the execution of his enemies, becoming the evil, embracing the heresy, that he had tried to escape.
John Wick: Chapter 4, Violence, Fraud, and Treason
John has become a tyrant of the High Table, and a rebellion is brewing against him. But not only is he a tyrant, he's a general who leads his men into battle. In Arabia, he strikes out against the palace of the fellow High Table member the Marquis. John leads a dozen men on an assault on the palace, killing everyone in his path in order to get to his target, an impediment to his power. He confronts the Marquis who has a trump card. He has dug up Helen's coffin and uses it as a bargaining chip. Defended by the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), the Marquis makes a deal. He will bend to Wick's vision of the table, not desecrate Helen's dead body, and nominate John to be the High Commander of the Table if John does something for him. John must go to Japan and prove that the owner of the Osaka Continental, Koji, has defrauded the High Table.
John agrees, and he goes to Osaka. There, he confronts Koji, an old friend, and learns that yes, Koji has been defrauding the High Table for years. However, it's because of the corruption of the High Table that he did it. This conversation reveals to John the depths into which he's sunk. Thinking he was in control, he realizes that he's only been the tool of corruption, a last gasp effort by the High Table to recruit him rather than have him dismantle them. So, he decides that he must turn traitor to the High Table but also deal with the fact that he had become a traitor to Helen in re-embracing the life he'd promised to leave.
John heads to New York and the Continental run by Winston, recruits the help of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), and becomes the one man killing machine against the High Table once more. He fights through his goons to find the High Table together, and he must execute them all. The fight leaves him fatally wounded, and he succumbs to his wounds, dying.
We fade to black, and we hear Helen's voice calling out for John.
No More than a Thought Exercise
The main problem I have with the overall feel of the actual sequels is that despite there being something like an overall story from one entry to the next, it's approached with such lack of care that it might as well not be there. John ends up just being a killing machine moving from one action sequence and thin interaction with a character with an unexplained backstory to the next. I want some kind of structure imposed on it, some kind of real progression of his character.
I really don't think there is one, that the John at the start of Chapter 2 is still the same at the end of Chapter 4, that he's nothing more than a cipher caught in someone else's plot for the vast majority of things, and that he has little agency. From the moment Santino shows up the marker and forces him back into the game, instead of John choosing to go back, the sequels are off the rails, forcing John into situations rather than having him guide himself. He does kind of gain his own direction in the fourth film, but it's very little very late, and we have so much obsession with other characters, lore, and world-building around rules of the organization that Wick ends up something of a side character in his own franchise.
Imposing a stronger structure from the beginning, borrowing from something like Inferno and having an eye towards John's journey first and foremost would have tremendously helped the sequels.
To No Avail
Chad Stahelski did not some to me before production and ask for my help. I am just a nobody off in the hinterlands wondering if I could have found a better way to give the people who love the 1/3 of these films that are no-holds barred action a bit more to grasp onto in between those action sequences.
The movies got really long, really obsessed with self-important world-building, and lost sight of its central, eponymous character really quickly. And I do not understand the money they made and their relative popularity.
Do people really remain gripped in between the action scenes? Or do they wander off, look at their phones, and do other things as they wait for the sound of gunshots and pumping music to reappear? I imagine that there are some, but I am not one of them. All of the praise I hear of the films is the action itself. The stuff in between could use some punching up, right?
The Rossiter Case (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not the most involving thing, but it's a good melodrama that understands what it needs to do and how to do it." [Library]
To Have and to Hold (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I mean, the films' not bad, but it kind of makes no real sense and doesn't connect. It's very bland and a bit frustrating." [YouTube]
A Case for PC 49 (Rating 1/4) Full Review "The whole "based on a BBC radio serial" was mostly a mark of warning in this era, it seems." [YouTube]
Cloudburst (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Pure noir with a solid emotional foundation and good performances, very well filmed by Searle, but with an ending that just doesn't quite hit the way it should." [YouTube]
The Last Page (or, Man Bait) (Rating 3/4) Full Review "And the end result is a tense, knowing thriller that works solidly well. Welcome to the Hammer club, Mr. Fisher. I think you'll be a welcome addition." [YouTube]
Wings of Danger (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's not good, but it's a mild entertainment that looks good while it plays things out." [YouTube]
Never Look Back (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It functions, and no more. It's unexciting and largely unmemorable, but it works. Kind of." [Library]
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 4/18 and it will discuss something or other.
Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. When you follow the long and windy road, you end up with singing as a theme for this Hobby Thread.
As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome. I understand that some people pay attention to military hardware, tactics and strategy as a hobby. Discussion of current events permitted but must be made in the form of hobby commentary. Pants are optional. As always, puns are welcome and encouraged.
Play nice and do not be rude. Do not be a troll and do not feed the trolls.
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Your dino host is not known for being able to carry a tune. Dinosaurs in general are ranked lower in the animal kingdom on the scale of singers (and probably rank below most humans). You trying making "RAWR!" melodic.
Some among the Horde, however, are likely to be blessed. Do you sing in a church choir? Did you sing in a children's choir? Have you appeared on a stage and made music with a band?
Are you are a terrible singer, but love belting out the classics in the shower? Are you wise in the way of karaoke? Have you done karaoke in Japan?
Have you taken singing lessons? Have you had formal schooling? Have you sung professionally? Do you wish you tried but life took you in other directions? Have you sung at a friend's wedding or a family member's funeral?
Do you have horror stories of singing at your youth holiday concert recital? Do you have epic stories of when you carried a tune (whether good or bad)?
Have you sung in a venue that was special, such as a cathedral? Have you sung at an event that was special, such as a national anthem for a big game?
Let's limit the theme to voice. Musical instruments are an entirely different category.
Let's also keep this to YOUR singing. This is a hobby thread. There are plenty of other music threads to debate "the singer of my favorite band rocks" and "the singer of your favorite band sux."
Going to need help from the gray boxes on this one. You don't want to hear me sing. Trust me on that. If you are unable or uninterested in singing, whistling is an acceptable substitute.
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Beethoven to get started:
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Has anyone been in a Barbershop Quartet?
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Rick Beato with his top 20 vocal intros:
Any you've tried to emulate?
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Watch this video in the privacy of your own home. Attempt making musical sounds at your computer or phone. Report back.
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Is twelve hours sufficient?
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Hallelujah:
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Tennessee Whiskey:
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When the audience is the instrument:
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This will give you goosebumps. This video is a longer story of a TikTok video that went viral of an American singing acapella in a Spanish church. Skip ahead to the 5 minute mark if you just want to watch the singing.
When being pitch-perfect or in-tune is not the point:
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Ave Maria in the Dresden Frauenkirche:
If you are wondering whether taking in a concert at the Frauenkirche should be on your bucket list, we can confirm that it should be. We also had the memorable experience on a visit when the spirit moved two random visitors to sing Amazing Grace acapella.
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Interview with Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson about his singing style and technique (no, I didn't recognize him immediately either):
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Is this good advice?
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For the big finish:
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Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did a maps theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.
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Notable comments from last week:
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Words of wisdom:
"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).
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If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, contribute your own. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.
— Restoring Your Faith in Humanity (@HumanityChad) March 26, 2026
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Meet The PetMorons
The Big Dummy dozes in his man cave at a show. It's a 4x4x4 pen with a top that can be put together in a few minutes, giving him plenty of room to stand or lie down on blanket and pads. Sheets hung on the outside give him some privacy, he has food, water and chew toys and a floor fan to keep him cool. The only things missing are beer and a TV.
Hadrian the Seventh
He's all set, and looks relaxed! Thanks for sending in the great photo of his life at a show. Quite the set-up!
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PetMoron Adjacent Animals
Encountered by Members of The Horde
&&&
This week's wildlife photo is... a Gray Treefrog (Hyla Versicolor)
A man eating amphibian, weren't they one of the bad guys in Jack Chalker's Well of Souls series of novels?
BifBewalski
I don't know about the series of novels, but I looked up another famous amphibian: From an Aztec god to Minecraft star. Why does Mexico love the axolotl so much?
Legend has it the axolotl was not always an amphibian
It's nearing Passover and Easter, and here we have a flower associated with Christmas (maybe a different subspecies). I love its distinctive flowers!
The hellebores started blooming in mid-March. I first planted them by the concrete steps years ago when there was a weeping cherry providing shade. We had to take the cherry down after the trunk split and I expected to need to move the hellebores since they're supposed to be shade plants. They have been growing and blooming for over ten years in full afternoon sun. Hellebores hate being moved, at least in my experience, so I've left them alone since they seem to be doing fine!
Chandelier plant (Kalanchoe delagoensis): Received something small from a fellow gardener who lives down the street. Over the summer, it got strong and multiplied (also known as Mother of Millions), and now the stand has been flowering nicely for a few weeks.
An interesting succulent. I think that this is a good plant for beginners.
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Edible Gardening/Putting Things By
The strawberries are Fragaria vesca that I grew from seed last year, basically just to see if I could. I didn't expect them to survive the winter as they were growing in a clay pot left out on the top step. I was surprised to see there were two flowers by May 20th. The plant is supposedly self pollinated but our temps are going down again so might not see any berries right now.
Lirio100
Beautiful! Let us know how they taste! Another photo of the ripe berries would be fun.
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I think that Lirio's strawberries are in a "safe" container.
from The Nature Nomad
Cadmium, arsenic and lead are problem minerals here. Zinc, usually not so much, unless you really get a lot of it. You need SOME zinc. You don't need any cadmium.
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Gardens of The Horde
Updated landscaping around the pond. Mexican heather along the walkway with poker plants behind them.
Phlox around the falls. Herbs on the slope. Lantana and yarrow for the butterflies. Petunias and dianthus for the humming bird. Bird feeders for everyone else.
Cross vine, Carolina Jessamine, and honeysuckle along the fence with some cannas because they’re outta control. Flowering yucca in red and yellow.
Daffodils, irises, dianthus and daylillies along the wall. Caladiums and hostas under the fig tree.
And the auxiliary office.
R/s
CrotchetyOldJarhead
WOW!
A lot of work! Everything looks great. Thanks for sending in the photos.
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Hope everyone has a nice weekend.
If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden at g mail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
This week, I ran across a podcaster who blamed the influence of the "Rockefeller-funded" General Education Board in the 1930s for the inability of Boomers to see that Israel was behind most of the problems in the world. The internet allowed podcasters to show younger people the truth. He thought most Boomers were stuck in limited ways of thinking like Mike Huckabee - - unable the process "gotcha" questions of Tucker Carlson, like one about the ancestors of the Prime Minister of Israel.
Hmmmm.
I kinda think that Mike Huckabee is not the best example of a guy who thinks on his feet in confrontations with intellectual foes. There has been some conflict centered around him recently in connection with his role as ambassador to Israel. While the "Woke Right" thinks he always kowtows to the Israeli point of view, he seems in at least one instance here to have gone in the other direction to appease Catholics and others without knowing the facts. I don't think this had much to do with the General Education Board in the 1930s and Boomers in general.
I'm also not real sure that the typical under-a-minute hot takes from today's podcasts are advances in our intellectual lives, especially if most people stay in "bubbles" with people who agree with them.
Do you think the next step from the internet - robot teachers - will help?
"Figure 03" AI-powered robot accompanies first lady Melania Trump to a White House summit on empowering children with educational technology. pic.twitter.com/RShdfvEG38
Update: Think a robot would show this film to Tucker's followers, or the followers of podcasters who follow him?
This colorized video is a collection of B-roll footage mostly shot in the Arab town of Akko (a shot of Jewish sunbathers on a beach slips in momentarily) for a “March of Time” documentary on British ruled Palestine praising the prosperity brought to the land by the Jews 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Zxd8uLDWIa
The thread (not real current) below includes ideas concerning ways that being too smart can get in the way of progress. Several of them may be relevant to current military actions:
John Fowles explains in "The Aristos" (1964) how high IQ can subvert your will to act: "High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis." Rule 1: Do not lose the will pic.twitter.com/qvBc8TdHZg
A LOT of interesting stuff here. But below are a few selections from the thread above if you don't have time to read it all:
1/ Carlyle in 1841: "A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things." Chesterton on how an open mind is no more a virtue than an open mouth: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid”
2/ A knight who owns a sharp sword should make sure he does not cut himself with it, and a man gifted with a great mind should make sure he does not start living inside it...
This is gold. One of the less talked about side-effects of intelligence—seeing every possible outcome from every possible perspective = philosophical rumination, stagnation. I practice now setting boundaries with my open mind, directing it wisely instead of being a slave to it.
Napoleon on how he planned wars: "There is no man more pusillanimous than I when I am planning a campaign" In the planning stage, Napoleon exaggerated, in his mind "all the dangers and calamities" possible BUT while fighting, he forgot everything "except what led to success"
Does it seem sometimes like life is just one long TSA line? Cheer up! You could be a ship stuck at the Strait of Hormuz. But I have an idea that will supercharge this weekend’s off-Broadway revival of the “No Kings” improv troupes. . .
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Music
✨🇨🇳Robots play traditional Chinese drums in perfect sync—what a cool mix of tech and culture! pic.twitter.com/wlkKjJ5QE0
The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
[Every. Single Day!]
Good morning boys and girls and every thing in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in Poy Sippi.)
1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind, be nice. Ace's house, Ace's rules.
3) Running with sharp objects is highly frowned upon.
4) Have a great weekend!
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
2/14 – L gave an update on her brother Ron. He has been in declining health for the last 6+ months, and has been transferred to a nice facility for hospice. They had been discussing this possibility for months. He would make improvements, then relapse, each time ending up more disabled. The best part is that he is at peace with the decision. He is aware enough to assist with the final plans and is enjoying parceling out his remaining possessions to family and friends. L’s daughter’s cardiac recovery continues. L says she cannot thank all sufficiently for the many prayers.
3/21 Update – Ron’s struggle is over. He died on 3/9. His 65th birthday would have been 3/22. His funeral was well attended and many people described him as their “best friend”. Despite never being married of having children, he leaves a legacy to be proud of. L’s daughter has finally recovered enough to start cardiac rehab. They expect great progress. L and her husband are rebuilding their relationship after putting it on the back burner for far too long, and working to get healthier. Thanks to everyone who prayed. It has meant a lot.
2/20 – Gouveneur Morris requested prayers for herself as she has surgery scheduled for 2/27 for spondylolisthesis.
3/5 Update - Gouveneur Morris’ surgery was successful – every prayer and thought directed her way is appreciated.
3/2 – RickZ posted that he received bad news. He went to the ER with muscle pain and came out with a cancer diagnosis. He could use prayers for an extremely capable oncological team of cancer specialists, and that God guides their hands and minds as they work to rid Rick of cancer. And also that God would provide him peace and calm, and to help sustain him through this trial.
3/5 – Inogame posted the good news that baby #5 arrived! Baby was overdue by 12 days. Mom and baby are doing well. Baby was 9 pounds 8 ounces, and 21.5 inches long.
3/5 – IrishEI has learned that she needs major surgery on 3/16, and she would really appreciate prayers.
3/7 – Uncle Slayton posted the good news that his son-in-law, Kenny, is almost 3 years cancer-free. He beat lymphoma and leukemia, and Uncle Slayton wanted to thank everyone who prayed for him.
3/7 – Joe Kidd sent an update on a previous prayer, for a young girl named Jasmine. She is the adopted daughter of a friend of a friend. She had been rescued from abuse, but was withdrawn, etc. The friend took the family on an RV trip, and with lots of TLC for Jasmine, things have improved. It appears that God has surrounded this young girl with an army of angels, and your prayers for her are being heard. May those listed here and whispered elsewhere receive similar affirmation.
3/7 – vmom deport deport deport requested prayers for GB, the husband of her friend; he just had a quadruple bypass a couple of days ago, following a heart attack.
3/10 – Warai-otoko asked for prayers for a sister-in-law with some respiratory issues, who just took a hard turn for the worse. Thanks to everyone, even if you just take a fraction of a second for it.
3/10 – Update on Susan, who we have been praying for as she battles cancer. She is hospitalized again with an infection in her colon that quickly turned bad. The doctor says the signs are sepsis but they are running tests to make sure. The good news is that the pancreatic cancer was and is responding to the chemo and her cancer numbers are going down. God bless and thank you!
3/19 Update – Susan is still in the hospital, but she is doing 100% better. The doctors are not ready to release her yet, but everything is going in the right direction. They keep saying “maybe tomorrow”.
3/23 Update – Susan finally was able to come home. She is doing better than expected. Thanks to everyone for your prayers.
3/11 – Bulg sends a prayer of thanks. He called his formerly estranged sister on her birthday, and they had a wonderful conversation. It was their second conversation since February, and there was no animosity at all.
3/11 – Doof sent his appreciation for the Horde’s prayers for his mom, who has been in post-hospitalization rehab since mid-January. She has recovered from her illnesses, but her body seems to be increasingly giving up on her. PT has become too painful and exhausting for her. She is also having increased brain fog and is rapidly losing the ability to do things like answer her phone or send texts. Continued prayers requested for her, as she is very sad, and also for Doof and his sister as they figure out what’s next.
3/16 Update – Doof’s mother is not doing very well. Her 100 days of post-hospital rehab will be ending soon, and she is not nearly recovered enough to live alone. She’s almost completely confined to bed. She will be moved to long-term care soon, and will likely be there for the rest of her life. They appreciate the prayers.
3/14 – Retired Buckeye Cop asks for prayers for Mrs. Cop’s cousin, “A.B”. He has been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He is a retired police officer who was hit by a car years ago. He attempted to deal with the pain by self-medicating with too much Tylenol, which ended up poisoning his liver. His only alternative is a liver transplant, but he is uncertain if he wants to have surgery.
3/21 Update – A.B.’s situation isn’t quite as dire as originally thought. It’s still bad, but his readings are better than originally thought.
3/18 – TecumsehTea requests prayers, as her husband was fired from a job he enjoyed very much on 3/17. Prayers are needed for peace, direction, and clarity. They trust God will provide the right job at the right time, and that He would give them peace in the waiting. TecumsehTea is still dealing with the effects of her heart attack last July. Prayers for healing, as her BP continues to be unstable. Chronic Lyme disease and autoimmune disease complicates everything. She trusts that God is faithful and good and He will take care of their needs.
3/21 – FenelonSpoke asked for prayers for her son, who is still looking for work. He has a horticulture major, and would ideally like something related to research, but he is certainly willing to labor outdoors.
3/21 – Count de Monet gave prayers of thanks for a son who has been accepted into the IVEW Apprenticeship program. He will earn while he learns for 4 years on his way to becoming a Journeyman Electrician.
3/21 – pookysgirl asked for prayers as they start IVF again.
3/22 – Retired Buckeye Cop has a happy prayer request. His 16 year old grandson said he is feeling a call to the priesthood within the Catholic Church. He is a devout young man who has particular compassion for the poor. (He thinks he might want to be a Franciscan friar.) Please pray for L. H. as he pursues the vocation of religious life.
3/22 – JackStraw asked for prayers for IrishEi. She has been in the hospital for nearly a week. It sounds like she is on the mend, hopefully.
3/24 – NR Pax requested prayers for a friend. On Sunday, the friend went to ER after collapsing at work. After a series of tests, she was found to have pulmonary arterial hypertension. Her current prognosis is five years left to live.
3/24 – GMAC posted that he has received his death sentence. His prostate cancer has metastasized into his bones. Medication will slow it down, but there is no stopping it. He doesn’t know how much time he has, but plans to do some travelling while he can. He sends his compliments to “the wittiest group of morons” he has ever had the pleasure of reading. He will still be lurking.
For submission guidelines and other relevant info, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. If you see a prayer request posted in a thread comment, feel free to copy and paste it and e-mail it to Annie's Stew. She tries to keep up with the requests in the threads, but she's not here all of the time, so she may not see it unless you e-mail it to her. Please note: Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks or so unless we receive an update.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.
Some glitches with the sites aside, this server has been running nonstop for two years, and that's pretty typical for Linux. It only reboots when you reboot it.
That is they can refresh as little as once per second, if you're just sitting there looking at a static screen - or up to 120Hz if the display is active.
Apple's new MacBook Neo has a phone CPU that uses as little as 4W, but still has fairly mid-tier battery life. What's draining all that power?
You guessed it.
The panels are already shipping as the default choice in Dell's latest XPS models.
The share offering is expected to be small - about 2% of the total stock - but will value the company at $500 to $700 billion.
SK Hynix reported 50% revenue growth and 100% growth in profits in 2025 - and only the last couple of months of that were in the DRAM Apocalypse - so I don't think they'll have a hard time finding buyers.
Recent reports of open-source projects - including Linux - being overwhelmed by useless AI-generated bug reports have ameliorated into useful AI-generated bug reports.
Nobody knows exactly why the change, but this is something I am personally in favour of. Testing in-depth is time-consuming and painfully boring, precisely the sort of job you'd give to an junior developer with clinical OCD in the good old days.
Now everyone has a junior developer with clinical levels of OCD.
Little girl raises wombat orphaned due to wildfire.
Performing a "shit hot carrier break," which I think means flying in for a carrier landing after a very tight final turn.
Using catapults to launch three wingsuit skydivers off a mountain. Unfortunately, not the kind of catapults you're thinking of. More like launch-sleds.
Special operators drop boats and then parachute out of the back of a C-17.
Men of a certain age will appreciate this hobbyist's efforts to make a Star Wars playset that never existed -- Luke Skywalker's workshop/hangar. You know, where he gives C-3PO the hot oil bath.
Albert the Camel somehow conned his way into a gig as a house pet. (I looked this one up, it seems real. I just got burned on another one.)
Flying a paramotor -- a parachute propelled by a fan -- to 17,500 feet.
Rescuing a giant bat -- a flying fox -- who got stuck in a school bathroom and scared people. Even though he's a cutie.
Wingsuit flyby of a castle. I have it cued to the castle fly-by.
I get requests for more yak content, as, of course, most bloggers do. I hope this is sufficient: 1. a yak thundering across the steppe (I assume, I'm not clear on what a steppe is), 2, some kind of yak dance, and 3, a Tibetan Yak Butter Churning Dance. As they say in Nepal, "Girl who churns yak butter all day long has Hands of Paradise at night."
I haven't been this excited by erotic butter-churning since 2014.
Now that's some quality yak content I think you will agree.
Remember when Biden assigned Trump a bunch of fat 5'1" housefraus as his Secret Service "protection" detail during a very heated presidential campaign?
Remember how we all thought, "When Trump wins, I hope he assigns the Bidens the same D-List Dregs"?
A U.S. Secret Service agent accidentally shot himself Friday morning while on duty during a security detail for former first lady Jill Biden at Philadelphia International Airport, according to officials and local reports.
The incident unfolded around 8:30 a.m. as agents were assisting with movement through the airport, a heavily trafficked hub at that hour. Authorities said the agent's service weapon discharged while he was handling it, striking him in the leg. The injury was described as non-life-threatening, and the agent was transported to a nearby hospital where he is reported to be in stable condition.
A spokesperson for the United States Secret Service characterized the shooting as a "negligent discharge," indicating the weapon fired unintentionally. Officials emphasized that there was no disruption to the protectee's schedule and that Jill Biden was not present at the time the weapon went off.
Woke Cereal: Cheerios now features "Eat Pray Love" style affirmations on the box because everything is Fake and Gay.
Trans woman dressed up like Blues Brothers allegedly murdered millionaire developer in LA
A transgender woman dressed up like a Blues Brother allegedly murdered a millionaire developer in his Los Angeles home before having an hours-long standoff with a SWAT team, authorities said.
Eleanor Beaulieu, 39, was charged Sunday in the killing of Demetrius Doukoullos and is being housed in Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail, according to inmate records.
Cops responded to check on Doukoullos, 92, at his Hermosa Beach home around 12:30 p.m. Saturday after his realtor hadn't heard from him for about a week, police said.
"It began as a routine welfare check and escalated to a suspected homicide," Hermosa Beach Police Public Information Officer Sgt. Keagan Dadigan said on Monday.
Neighbors reported a foul odor coming from the home and sightings of a suspicious person, according to Easy Reader News.
Suspicious person?
SUSPICIOUS PERSON?!
What was so "suspicious"? Her COURAGE?! Her TRANS JOY?!!
...
When police arrived, Beaulieu told them he was armed, Dadigan said, leading to a tense seven-hour standoff.
"That subject made statements about being armed and dangerous and then barricaded themselves inside the residence," authorities said, KTLA5 reported.
Why are you bigots so prejudiced against transgender murderers with guns?
Eventually, an officer warned Beaulieu through a bullhorn that they would force their way in.
"Eleanor, come out with your hands up. This has been going on long enough," the officer yelled repeatedly, the Daily Mail reported.
Law enforcement sources told NBC4 that Doukoullos' body was partially decomposed with signs of trauma.
...
Beaulieu has been charged with homicide. His bail has been set to $2 million.
The New York Post had previously Respecced the Pronouns but it admirably calls this Trans Hero of Bravery "he" and "him" throughout the account.
Federal authorities have confirmed that a suspect charged with attempted murder for slashing a woman's throat and leaving her to die in Utah is an illegal alien from Mexico.
...
Ramirez-Padilla reportedly told authorities he and the woman smoked meth together and admitted he "had been having thoughts of killing someone, and today, he decided that he was going to kill (the woman)."
"Jesus said he strangled (the woman) from behind while they were both standing until (she) became unconscious and fell to the ground. Once on the ground, Jesus placed his hands around (her) neck and continued (choking her)."
"Jesus said he wanted to take (the woman) out of her misery and then used a blade to cut her throat two or three times. Jesus told detectives he intended to kill (the woman). Jesus told detectives his state of mind was altered from ingesting drugs," an arrest affidavit stated.
...
In a statement provided exclusively to Border Hawk, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that Ramirez-Padilla is an illegal alien from Mexico who entered the U.S. at an unknown location and date.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer against Ramirez-Padilla and is urging local authorities to not release him back into the community.
"Jesus Alejandro Ramirez-Padilla is a dangerous criminal illegal alien who violently strangled and slit a woman's throat multiple times," said DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis.
"We are calling on politicians to not release this barbaric criminal from jail and into American neighborhoods. This criminal illegal alien has no place in American communities."
Where Are All the Campus Protests?
Two years ago, students occupied buildings and colonized the quad. Now the same places are strangely silent.
The events of the past three months seem almost perfectly engineered to spark campus unrest. In January, mass-deportation operations led to the brazen killing of U.S. citizens at the hands of masked immigration agents. In February, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it would no longer regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. A few weeks later, the Trump administration joined forces with Israel to launch an attack on Iran without congressional approval. One might expect left-leaning college students to have practically started a revolution.
But campuses across the country--places where, just two years ago, students occupied buildings and colonized the quad to protest Israel's war against Hamas--are strangely silent. These days, those same students mostly head to class. The extent of the change is jarring. David Sengthay, a Stanford senior and the head of the undergraduate-student senate, told me that protests typified the university's history, up to and including his first two years in Palo Alto. But by the time he returned as a junior, in fall 2024, something was different. "My class is the last class to really witness what happened at Stanford during its peak organizing," he said. "People come to Stanford, these young students, and they don't have access to what was promised to them. I know we're not UC Berkeley, but, I mean, we still protested the Vietnam War."
This might seem like an abrupt and mysterious reversal in campus culture. In fact, it's a sign that student protest was never a fact of nature, but rather an administrative choice. Universities chose to let campus demonstrations get out of control; now they're choosing to suppress them. This is why, even as legal challenges have blocked the Trump administration from enacting much of its higher-education agenda, the president has clearly achieved his aim of ending the protest movement. He has been able to do so largely because university leaders, tired of the chaos they had allowed to thrive, were quietly on board.
...
But the protests soon spun out of control... That winter and spring, elite-university presidents were hauled in front of Congress to testify about protesters' conduct and their response to instances of anti-Semitism at the demonstrations. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, and Northwestern subsequently resigned, unable to justify their decisions either to Congress or to their own outraged board members and donors.
The hearings marked a turning point. Universities began taking more aggressive action against protesters. According to Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, the sector's largest trade group, the angry backlash from Congress gave some administrators political cover to do what they privately had already wanted to do....
Once Donald Trump assumed office, shutting down disruptive protests took on even more urgency. Almost immediately, the president signed executive orders promising to investigate and discipline protesters for anti-Semitism. Universities began taking action against their own students before Trump could do so. At Yale, about 200 students began forming an encampment to protest Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir speaking at an event near campus. Administrators told students to disperse, disciplined repeat offenders, and ended Yale's association with a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. At Columbia, when students occupied a library room ahead of finals week, the university immediately called in the police. "Colleges are doing what they can to try to stay out of the spotlight," Robert Kelchen, a professor of education policy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. At the same time, some academics think that the students themselves are different: Whether because of concerns about the worsening job market or a cultural shift rightward, they seem less interested in raising hell on campus.
What's clear is that the cost of doing so has gone up. Last March, the Trump administration detained and attempted to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who had led many of the anti-Israel protests. Later that month, federal agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student who had written an opinion piece supporting Palestine. Other students had their active immigration status revoked for activism around Palestine
...
"Students don't even know: Am I waiting to get in trouble by the dean, or am I waiting to get in trouble by, like, DHS?" Amanda Nordstrom, who leads the Campus Rights Advocacy department for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me.
...
Sengthay said that he and other Stanford students had envisioned college as a "playground for free speech and democracy" before the greater responsibilities and pressures of adult life. They've since discovered that the rules of the game have changed.
Via Beege Wellborn, aggressive colonizers demand that the UK "decolonize" Shakespeare's home because it's White Supremacy that the greatest writer of the all-white-until-thirty-years-ago British Isles was white.
And the UK is, of course, complying with their conquerors' demands.
[Daily Mail:] William Shakespeare's birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the 'greatest' playwright 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy'.
...It wants to 'create a more inclusive museum experience' and announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare's ideas were used to advance 'white supremacy' ideas.
The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.
It comes amid an ongoing backlash against the writer. Some productions of his works have been slapped with trigger warnings for misogyny, racism and 'problematic radicalised dynamics' that link whiteness to beauty.
A transgender lawyer -- woman jacked up on male hormones -- keeps interrupting a judge and is repeatedly told to stop interrupting or else she'll be held in contempt. But those superphysiological levels of testosterone give her roid rage. She plays the "I'm a transgender lawyer" card and claims that the judge is a transphobe.
Eventually the judge calls for her to be arrested and, of course, the steroid-addled woman resists arrest.
Oh, and then she goes through the entire BLM/antifa/transgender playbook, saying "Do not hurt me," "I can't breathe," "I can't see," "Call 911," and "call a female police officer." Oh -- right. See, when this "man" is arrested by male officers, suddenly she's a woman again and demands a female police officer.
Unhinged transgender attorney, a woman pretending to be a man, was arrested for contempt of court after she continuously screamed at the judge
She then yelled, "I can't breathe," while getting tossed to the ground, and demanded a female officer.
Well, maybe only some of us did. But it was a widely-believed myth.
In a high-profile murder appeal before the Georgia Supreme Court, the "lawyer" -- an Assistant DA, and I imagine a DEI hire -- used ChatGTP to do her "research," and the AI invented a bunch of fake cases which she cited in her motion without even bothering to look them up to see if they even existed.
The judge did check to see if they existed:
So before you sit down, there's one more thing I need to ask you about, unfortunately. In reviewing the trial court's order denying the motion for new trial, there are at least five citations to cases that don't exist. And there's at least five more citations to cases that do not support the proposition for which they're cited, including three quotations that don't exist. My understanding is that you prepared the order for new trial -- uh, the denial order -- for the trial court. Were those citations in the version of the order that you submitted to the trial court?
The judge asked if the fake cases were used in the state's brief to deny the woman a new trial. At first, Clayton County Assistant District Attorney Chantel Leslie said, "No, your honor, I do not believe so." But the judge fixed her with a dead stare and intoned, "So those those non-existent cases were cited in your initial brief opposing the motion for new trial."
She replied, "Your honor, I'm not aware of that, but I would be glad to research that and provide the court with a supplement."
That's OK, dipstick lady prosecutor, the wonderful legal site, The Volokh Conspiracy, did your job for you. The website found that, yes, both the initial and revised orders cited the bogus cases.
"DEI is a cancer upon the body politic, but not overly so." -- Stuff Jefferson Said, volume 4, revised and expanded edition
The spring breaker who "twerked" while atop a speeding Jeep, and who was then thrown from the vehicle, has died of his injuries.
A 22-year-old spring breaker who was caught on viral video half-naked and twerking on top of a speeding SUV has died after he was flung from the Jeep in a drunken crash.
...
The deadly spring break saga unfolded March 14 when a shirtless Brown was filmed dancing suggestively on the Jeep's roof as it sped down Highway 361, cops said.
Brown was thrown from the vehicle when the alleged drunk driver of the SUV, Riley Rhoades, smashed into a Tesla during the chaotic joyride.
Separate footage taken by horrified witnesses in the aftermath showed first responders treating Brown in the middle of the highway as the driver and fellow passengers -- all clad in swimsuits -- watched.
...
The Jeep's driver was arrested for DWI at the scene after failing a breathalyzer test, police said.
Video here. It shows this idiot twerking, but not the part where he's thrown from the vehicle, though the clip does end with post-incident video of people standing around looking at his body. There is, supposedly, blurry video from the camera in the Tesla showing his body flipping end over end towards the road, but I won't link that.
Apparently twerking while hanging outside speeding vehicle is a trend for the young and deeply brain-damaged. I'll just link this clip, as it results in some good Justice for the Stupid, but completely non-lethal Justice for the Stupid.
WOW🚨: This Gen Z girl thought twerking in a moving carwash with the door wide open was a brilliant idea 😭🚗💦
In Case You Missed It: Intercepts of Foreign Parties Revealed Ukraine's Plot to Take US Taxpayer Dollars Given To Them By Biden to Illegally Contribute to Biden's Reelection Effort
—Disinformation Expert Ace
I posted this briefly yesterday before I realized CBD had just posted about the same topic.
Before that:
BREAKING: DHS Sec. Markwayne Mullin has just BEGUN the process of paying some 50,000 THOUSAND TSA agents at President Trump's orders
U.S. intercepted Ukraine government messages discussing plot to route money to Biden re-election
Newly-unclassified documents show that in 2022 Ukrainian officials discussed diverting hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars -- earmarked for clean energy -- back to Biden's ill-fated 2024 campaign. There is no evidence the intercepted allegations were investigated during the Biden administration.
There's also no evidence that the formally crazy-about-foreign-interference propaganda media has reported any of this.
It's almost as if they actively support foreign election interference, so long as it benefits their precious Communist "Democrat" Party.
U.S. intelligence intercepted Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden's 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a declassified intelligence report summarizing the intercepts that was obtained by Just the News.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently learned of the intercepts and has asked the U.S. Agency for International Development officials to scour for records to see if the plot actually was carried out and whether a criminal referral should be made to the FBI.
Gabbard's team has not found substantive evidence the intercepted allegations were thoroughly investigated during the Biden administration, and the communications are not believed to be tied to Russian disinformation efforts, officials said.
The declassified report is a summary of raw intercepts from U.S. spy agencies in late 2022 concerning the alleged plot, and officials who have reviewed the files said there seemed to be a lack of curiosity to investigate such an explosive allegation of foreign interference in a U.S. election.
It actually gets worse in the next paragraph: US government personnel were personally involved in the conspiracy.
"The Ukrainian Government and unspecified U.S. Government personnel, through USAID in Kyiv, reportedly developed a plan that would provide hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to fund an infrastructure project for Ukraine that would be used as a cover to send approximately 90% of funds allocated to the DNC to fund Joe Biden's reelection campaign," the declassified summary of the intercepts stated.
"They were confident the project would be funded initially, even though at some time in the future the project would be disapproved as unnecessary. At this time, the money would already be allocated and impossible to return or use for a different purpose," the report added.
The intercepts mentioned two American subcontractors as possible recipients of the money that would eventually be moved to Democratic coffers, officials said. The names are included in still classified raw spy data but were redacted from the declassified report obtained by Just the News.
"The plan included details of how subcontractors would be funded through U.S. companies so that how the funds were spent and allocated would be difficult to track," the declassified summary stated. "Additionally, contracts would be executed that would be difficult to verify. In this manner, most of the U.S. funding would be diverted to Joe Biden's election campaign without the ability to track where exactly the funds came from."
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., says House Republicans will not accept a Senate-passed bill to fund the majority of the Department of Homeland Security, minus ICE and border patrol.
The Senate bill does not include additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol -- and it does not include any of the demands Democrats made to limit the tactics of federal immigration officers. Republicans in the House met Friday after the legislation passed and rejected the plan.
"This gambit that was done last night is a joke," Johnson told reporters at the Capitol.
Johnson said the House will vote instead on a stop-gap spending bill to fund the entire Department of Homeland Security until May 22.
"I spoke to the president a few moments ago, he understands exactly what we're doing and why. And he supports it," Johnson said.
Johnson said he expects Republicans will pass the bill in the House, leaving the Senate to take up the measure. However, is very unclear if the stop-gap could pass in the Senate. Senators have already left Washington and Democrats have refused to vote for any spending bill that funds ICE.
Johnson also referred to Trump's promise to pay TSA agents through executive action as a near-term way to alleviate backups at airports across the country. Trump signed a memo Friday, to do so.
Is he right to reject it?
Overton
@overton_news
1h
Mask off moment.
Speaker Mike Johnson QUESTIONS whether Senate Republicans actually read the bill they passed to the House before heading on recess.
Johnson then turned to the cameras and read a jaw-dropping section aloud for the media.
JOHNSON: "This gambit that was done last night is a JOKE."
"I'm quite convinced that it can't be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill, and I'm going to just read you one excerpt of it, because it's pretty alarming, and it says everything that you need to know."
"In section four...this is on page two of the bill...."
"It says, 'The contents printed under the headings of this bill, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border security operations under the heading of US Customs and Border Patrol and Protection shall have no force or effect for purposes of this act and amounts specified in the final bill under the subheading border security operation, and under the heading U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and under the headings of US Immigration and Customs enforcement, in the Department of Homeland Security shall be...ZERO.'"
"We're not doing that."
I don't know if that means the additional funding that had previously been in the bill is reduced to zero, or if it means all the funding these agencies currently have is reduced to zero. I suspect it means the former, not the latter. That is, it stops the new funding, which I don't like but which we already knew, not the already-in-place funding.
In more fulfilling news: As you know, Vance was appointed by Trump to be the country's fraud investigation tsar. The left scoffed at this claiming it was a fake appointment because, you see, there is no widespread welfare and medicaid fraud in America, and so this was a time-wasting assignment designed to humble and punish Vance.
In reality, of course, it's just about the greatest prize a Republican politician should want.
This is regarding her fake-marrying her gay brother to give him a fraudulent immigration status in the US, not about she herself being added to another person's family to commit immigration fraud. (That is, she came in pretending to be a member of a family which had an immigration approval.)
Vice President JD Vance said Friday that Rep. Ilhan Omar defrauded the US by allegedly marrying her brother to help him remain legally in the country.
"We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America," Vance told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on the latest episode of his show.
Vance added that he's been discussing legal remedies with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, explaining that questions have been raised: "How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually build the case to actually get some justice for the American people?"
The vice president claimed the Minnesota Democrat "has been at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somalian community" -- and that was also something that should be under investigation.
🚨 BREAKING — IT'S OFFICIAL: JD Vance's White House fraud task force is TARGETING Ilhan Omar for committing immigration fraud
I missed this, or forgot about this, but Trump actually directed Vance to investigate this on March 15.
President Trump shows ZERO MERCY for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as he instructs Vice-President JD Vance to investigate the fraudulent liar…
“She married her brother, supposedly! That means she's here ILLEGALLY. She's one of the ringleaders here. She's BAD NEWS for our Country…” pic.twitter.com/ZPXPYxJCex
BREAKING: The late Special Counsel Robert Mueller allegedly had Special FBI Agent Vivien Moon "removed" from his Russiagate investigative team because "she would not allow the investigation [against Trump and his advisers] to become politicized," according to a newly declassified internal FBI memo
If you're keeping score, this this is the third FBI agent assigned to the Mueller probe -- that we know about -- who raised concerns about the investigation being politicized. https://t.co/e9JxuMZUM9
Reporter: How do you feel about the Iranian Foreign Minister accusing the US and Israel of genocide?
Marco Rubio: The Iranian? He's an expert in genocide. They've killed thousands. Every problem in the Middle East is Iran. Hezbollah? Iran. Shia militias destroying and… pic.twitter.com/BX9PwEzEuH
Yet another Bonus: Al Gore said his predictions that the world would be underwater by 2011 were all 100% correct and a Glug-Glug Day to You, Fellow Fishoid!
(He says this to the Bulwark's most openly gay Democrat propagandist, Tim Miller. They're mostly closeted over there.)
Al Gore says the doomsday predictions from climate scientists 20 years ago "were proven dead right," so we should take them even more seriously now.
He says it's "inevitable that we're going to see Greenland go and the west Antarctic ice sheet go."
Appeals Court Overrules Activist Leftwing Minnesota Judges, Declares That Illegal Aliens Can Be Held Indefinitely Without Bond While Waiting for Their Deportation
—Disinformation Expert Ace
This is important because if you want to deport someone -- put them on a plane -- you need to have physical custody of their bodies, and activist judges keep ruling that after ICE captures an illegal alien, he must be allowed to go free. He'll just show up for his actual deportation, right?
No, of course not. He will disappear "into the shadows," as Jeb Bush might say.
But that's what these activist, lawless Democrat judges want -- a soft judicial repeal of the power to deport. They can't just say "we're overruling Congress" -- Congress has the power to make laws about immigration and naturalization, of course -- so instead they just spam out fake requirement after fake requirement to make it effectively impossible to deport anyone.
In short -- they want to codify Biden's lawless executive decision to open the borders and guarantee all comers a permanent residency in America into "law" without having to go through the bother of actually changing the law.
Appeals court lets Trump administration hold many immigration detainees without bond
A panel of appeals court judges handed the Trump administration a major legal victory on Wednesday in its quest to detain large swaths of immigrants living in the country illegally, saying that people who entered the United States without inspection and admission can be detained without bond.
The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit marks the second time that a federal appellate court has sided with the administration on the issue, even as hundreds of lower court judges across the country have taken the opposite view. The conservative Fifth Circuit issued a similar ruling earlier this year.
Wednesday's ruling could impact more than 1,000 immigration detention cases in Minnesota alone, according to a source in the U.S. Attorney's office in that state. The Eighth Circuit also oversees six other states stretching from North Dakota to Arkansas.
The case involved a man named Joaquin Herrera Avila, a citizen of Mexico who was apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security in Minneapolis last August. DHS detained him without bond and brought removal proceedings against him.
His lawyers filed a petition of habeas corpus seeking his release, and the U.S. District Court in Minnesota granted the request. Wednesday's decision reversed the lower court's ruling.
The majority opinion was drafted by Judge Bobby Shepherd, a George W. Bush appointee, and joined by Judge L. Steven Grasz, a Trump appointee. Judge Ralph R. Erickson, who was appointed during President Trump's first term, dissented.
"Except for a single DUI, for nearly 20 years, Joaquin Herrera Avila had been living a law-abiding life in the United States," Erickson wrote. "For the past 29 years, Avila would have been entitled to a bond hearing during his removal proceedings. The court now holds that Avila--and millions of others--are subject to mandatory detention."
...
But the Trump administration has argued that anyone who entered the U.S. illegally is subject to mandatory deportation, unless immigration authorities grant them parole on humanitarian or public interest grounds.
Last fall, a Justice Department-run immigration court made a sweeping determination that the government could essentially detain a large swath of immigrants indefinitely while their removal proceedings are pending.
Since then, federal courts across the United States have been crushed by a tidal wave of cases filed by immigrants challenging their detention. In most cases, U.S. District Courts have sided with the immigrants and ruled against the government. According to a tally from Politico, more than 400 judges have ruled against the government in more than 5,000 cases.
The majority of Supreme Court justices appeared to be sympathetic to the idea that the Trump administration should be able to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. If the court rules in favor of the administration, the government will be able to revive a policy used during Trump's first term, where those seeking asylum were stopped at the border from setting foot in the US.
Federal law dictates that those who arrive in the US and are "physically present in the United States" or "arrive in the United States" can apply for asylum. The issue is whether noncitizens merely have to show up to the border to request asylum or if they have to cross the border fully before applying.
The majority of justices appeared to be sympathetic to the Trump administration in the case, per the New York Times. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that "arrives in" means that someone has fully crossed the border.
"'Arriving" sounds more 'in the process of.' 'Arrives in' sounds more like 'you've reached your destination,'" Justice Barrett said in the hearing. "If it's not crossing the physical border, what is the magic thing?" Former President Barak Obama implemented the policy where some seeking asylum would be turned around at the border, which was expanded by Trump. However, that policy was rescinded under the Biden administration.
Biden rejected Trump's border security measures and allowed tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cross into the United States, be paroled, and wait for immigration hearings that were often scheduled five or more years down the road. At one point during his term in office, Biden dismissed a bunch of immigration cases, leaving migrants in a legal limbo with neither legal status nor deporation orders.
The Trump administration has urged the justices to allow the policy to be reinstated. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that the debate about where a migrant is at when they request asylum is "very artificial." Two of the liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, had tougher questions for the administration in the case. They were the only justices who appeared sympathetic to allowing the full embrace of asylum claims at the border.
Look, we don't give thanks enough. Trump has had some bumps and oopsies this term, but he's been great 96% of the time. 96% will get you an A anywhere. An A+, really, with the curve.
I don't know if any of this will result in anything, but my stars, I need some hope.
This week, we learned that the probe into the Russian conspiracy theory in Florida is moving forward with the disclosure that former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed. What is different in this probe is that it is pursuing the real Russia conspiracy -- the creation of a false narrative to kneecap the first Trump administration.
At issue is what could be the greatest political hit job in history. Of course, the growing evidence of this conspiracy continues to be buried by one of its key components: the media. Nevertheless, the "truth will out," and it appears to be coming out in Florida.
Headed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the investigation is building on information uncovered by House and Senate committees that was long buried by the Biden administration. That evidence appears to show a knowing effort to manufacture a Russian conspiracy hoax at the urging of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
Ironically, the Washington Post and the New York Times received Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting promoting this Russian conspiracy hoax. The media spent years in wall-to-wall coverage of disproven allegations, including many claims made in the debunked Steele Dossier that had been secretly funded by the Clinton campaign.
The true Pulitzer Prize-worthy story was staring the media in the face the whole time: a conspiracy to create a false conspiracy narrative to elect Clinton and later to derail the Trump administration. The latter effort succeeded with help from top intelligence figures.
...
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Peter Strzok, a key figure in the investigation, texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page to assure her "that there's no way [Trump] gets elected," adding that they "can't take that risk." He added that they had it all in hand because "It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."
In fact, whether it was known to Strzok or not, there was an insurance policy in the works. In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton's alleged "plan" to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."
Brennan is believed to be a target of the current investigation, including possible perjury before Congress.
In reality, within days of that briefing on how Clinton would create this conspiracy theory, the investigation began, just as the Clinton campaign hoped it would.
Early on, the FBI was told by the CIA that its sources -- and the Steele dossier -- were unreliable. However, key FBI officials continued the surveillance and the investigation targeting the Trump campaign and key figures. One official later pleaded guilty to lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to continue surveillance without an evidentiary basis.
At the end of 2016, a CIA assessment found that "Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure." That presidential daily brief was scheduled to be published on Dec. 9, 2016, but the office of James Clapper, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, reportedly stopped the publication "based on some new guidance."
Clapper later joined Obama, along with John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and others, in a meeting that would ultimately inject the debunked theory directly into the media.
...
Back in 2016, the rewritten assessment was quickly leaked to an eagerly awaiting media. It was the perfect hit job carried out by top Obama administration officials at the very end of their time in power .
In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier "wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done."
Yet the declassified material appears to contradict that sworn statement. Brennan allegedly not only discussed the dossier but also insisted upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested.
Brennan and his handpicked team went to extraordinary lengths to revive the conspiracy theory that they knew was the original objective of the Clinton campaign.
Analysts complained that the reliance on the Steele Dossier "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment." One CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan "refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's main flaws, [Brennan] responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?'"
...
None of this will get anyone a Pulitzer, because the politics is wrong. However, it might just force the truth into the open. With Democrats promising to resume impeachments and investigations if they retake power in the midterms, it would be useful for the public to have a full understanding of what actually occurred last time.
It is time for the public to learn whether top Obama officials and the media pulled off the greatest political hoax in history
John Brennan may be indicted for perjury. He repeatedly testified under oath that the now-heavily-discredited Steele Dossier formed no part of his fake report implicating Trump in RUSSIAN collusion, but in contemporaneous documents, he says he fought for the inclusion of the fake dossier in the report:
Meanwhile: Paul Sperry says justice is coming for Ciaramella and his handler, the IG who fast-tracked his hearsay claims into an IG investigation, ignoring department rules to do so.
DEVELOPING: Atkinson will soon be in for a reckoning, along with Ciaramella ... developing ... https://t.co/O5509LhPKz
What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet. Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*
Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.
A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV. Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.
A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR? Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR. Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too. LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.
The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring. I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do. But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.
Finish the job, Mr. President! Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]
Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!
Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."
Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time. The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)
Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine
“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”
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